Project developers frequently find it helpful to use the Internet as a medium for collaborative review of documents. In traditional web-based applications for collaborative document review, bandwidth-intensive methods typically are used to expand, in a user's computer, a table of contents (TOC) referring to the documents. The user may select a displayed TOC node, e.g., by mouse-clicking on it, to display subordinate node(s) and/or content associated with the selected node. The application then may retrieve data corresponding to the entire TOC and hide collapsed nodes. Alternatively, an entire HTML page may be refreshed each time a TOC node is expanded. Both of these techniques fail to scale as TOC size increases. Where the number of documents being reviewed is very large, low-bandwidth network bottlenecks can result which can drastically slow the review process.